Firestorm

that it hit one of the quaint weathered tombstones and snapped it off like a broken tooth.

Imara made a low sound of terror. I pushed her behind me.

'Ashan,' I said. 'Thanks for your concern, but really, we're fine. No need to be worried.'

'Freak,' he said. 'Filthy groveling worm. You defile the ground you touch.' Voice like nothing at all. Gray, monotone, flat. No anger, but that didn't make me feel any better. Ashan didn't need to be angry. He just needed to be awake. 'You defiled the Oracle with your stench.'

'I saved the Oracle from a Demon Mark,' I said, and watched his expression. No surprise there. 'You knew. You knew he was infected. Why didn't you come running to save him?'

'You have no right to be here.' His empty eyes flashed toward Imara. 'Either of you.'

'Leave the kid out of it. If you want to smack somebody around—'

He moved too fast for me to see, and suddenly there was a stinging agony on the side of my face, and I was on my hands and knees. He'd slapped me. A leisurely, open-handed slap. If he'd used his fist, he'd have snapped my neck. 'Do not speak to me again.'

Imara threw herself in his path. 'You're not hurting my—'

Ashan didn't even break stride. He backhanded her so hard, she left the ground, twisted in midair, and flew twenty feet to slam into a massive gray headstone. I watched her, horrified. She didn't move after landing.

When I looked back at Ashan, it was too late. He grabbed my throat and dragged me kissing-close. I scrabbled and scratched at his hand, but it was like trying to pry steel with your fingernails. Overhead, dark clouds scudded in from the sea, moving fast and high, as if they wanted a ringside seat for the action. I could sense a certain eagerness up there. Storms always loved to see Weather Wardens getting their comeuppance.

'You,' Ashan said with gentle precision, his lips to my ear, 'should have stayed far, far away from here. You're too late, in any case. I've told the Mother the whole filthy history of humanity. None of Jonathan's benevolent, willful ignorance. None of David's foolish sentiment. The truth.'

'Truth?' I croaked. 'Or just your version?'

He was right. I should have headed the other way, fast, the minute I'd seen him turn the corner, but with Ashan, as with any major predator who has you at his mercy, it's best not to run unless you have an even shot at getting away. Bravado's the only real defense.

'You know the thing I like best about human beings?' he asked, and took hold of my right arm with his big, cold left hand. 'You break so easily.'

He pressed with his pale, white thumb. That was all. Just his thumb, and I felt the hot electric snap of a bone breaking, followed by a wet cascade of agony. I couldn't even scream. Couldn't get it past his choking hand.

His thumb moved. There were two bones in the arm, and he found the second with unerring precision.

Snap.

My shriek came out a strangled whimper. I saw red, and stars, and I wanted to heave but I'd just choke faster. And Ashan wasn't finished with me, that much was obvious.

'Call him,' Ashan murmured in my ear. He hadn't so much as raised his voice a single degree in temperature. 'Call your pet for me. He'll save you if you call him. He won't let me kill you.'

I wanted to. Badly. But I knew all too well what Ashan was doing; he wanted David here, alone, with a lover and a daughter to try to protect. David had power—boatloads of it, inherited from Jonathan—but Ashan wasn't far behind. And he wanted David's place as the hub at the center of the Djinn universe. He wanted to remove the only real threat to his power.

But mostly, he just wanted to do to David what he was doing to me. Terrorize, humiliate, torment.

'No.' I managed to mouth the word. I could protect David, if nothing else. His right hand flexed, and I felt my throat flex with it. It would be easy for him to kill me. Too easy.

'We'll see.' He still had hold of my arm, and now he deliberately, slowly, twisted it. I screamed again, but he'd trapped the sound in my throat where it frantically beat inside, like a bird in a trap. Red-hot wires of agony ran through me. It was like low-budget electrocution. I could feel tears streaming down my face and over his hand, and I was staring pleadingly at his blank teal-blue eyes. Looking for mercy. Looking for anything I could recognize as remotely human.

He smiled. It was the coldest expression I could imagine seeing on a face that pretended to be flesh and blood.

Somehow, I knew that the serene little town of Sea-casket hadn't noticed a thing, and wouldn't. Ashan could stand here in broad daylight and pull me apart like a rag doll, and nobody would notice a thing.

Just when I thought that he was really going to do it, he dropped me. I fell painfully hard to my knees, hugged my broken arm to my chest, and swayed on the verge of passing out. My wandering eyes focused on the crumpled form near the tombstones. Imara was still down. Not moving. I felt something go still inside me. The swirling darkness that had threatened to drag me down blew away, leaving me cold and utterly clear.

I gulped back the tears and the terror, and shifted my gaze up, to Ashan.

'You know what?' I croaked. It sounded ragged, and not quite sane. 'You and me, we have an understanding. Fair game. But I don't care how badass you think you are, you shouldn't have hurt my daughter.'

The artificially calm weather of Seacasket had been shattered by the tinkering I'd done to produce my lightning bolt; I reached out, grabbed the air, and started shaking. The world was going to hell anyway, and I wasn't about to let Ashan do this. Not to Imara. Not to me.

Not without a fight.

'You can't,' he said flatly.

Bullshit, I couldn't. I was a Warden. I had the power, and the lack of conscience to go with it. I'd had a Demon Mark, once upon a time. Maybe it had rotted something inside me that should have been thinking of the big picture, I don't know, but right at that moment, I was all about the world within fifty feet, and my child lying unconscious and at Ashan's nonexistent mercy.

Fifty feet happened to include the mausoleum that held the Oracle, too.

'You started it,' I said. I continued to shake up the system. It wasn't easy, especially with agony throbbing through my body in waves, but I was making progress. There was serious instability in the atmosphere. And offshore, the storm that had been hanging back saw its shot, and started rolling in with the wind at its back. Huge black sails of clouds, belling tight in the wind. Lightning was a scimitar in its teeth, and yo ho, mateys, the pirates were coming ashore.

'Stop,' Ashan said, and grabbed me by the hair. I grinned at him. Must have been gruesome, bloody teeth, bloodshot eyes.

'Make me.' I flipped electron polarities in the air, turning and turning and turning. Locking the chain in place with a sudden furious surge of energy, grounding energy from the storm clouds. 'I don't need David to whip your punk ass.'

Lightning hissed up from the ground, down from the clouds, and he was caught in the middle.

Flesh and blood vaporized instantly, along with all of Ashan's nice couture. I was too close. I caught the corona, was blown backward into the mausoleum wall, and ended up on the ground, screaming into a mouthful of grass because my broken arm had just gone up five steps on the ten-point agony scale, to fourteen. Man, I was trashed.

But Ashan was vapor.

That didn't mean he was dead, not at all, just not manifesting properly in human form. Didn't matter much to him, in terms of hurting him in any lasting way, but I was willing to bet that it had stung. He wasn't exactly roaring right back for a rematch. I lifted my head and saw him trying to coalesce out of the mist, and focused the wind into a hard, narrow channel, straight for him. It hit him like a cannon, blasted the mist apart, and this time, he came together more slowly. Hanging back.

I didn't bother to get up as his face formed in the fog. Not flesh and bone, more of a ghost-image. Spooky. I sounded a hell of a lot more confident than I felt. 'Turn around and leave, Ashan, because I swear, the next thing I hit will mean a lot more to you than your skin.'

I sensed his smug disbelief. So I hit the mausoleum with a lightning bolt.

The world went nuts. Really nuts. Winds howling, lightning stabbing all over the sky in an insane display of fury, ground rumbling… hailstones pelted out of the clouds, the size of golf balls. A couple hit me, and if my arm hadn't already been overwhelming me with agony, that would have been serious pain.

Ashan managed to form himself into pseudoflesh—not quite human, for certain, because he was misting out